I prefer the Nicene Creed, myself.

But we’d have to be naive or worse to think that either the religious right or the most extreme secularists on the left have any intention of letting go of this fight anytime soon.  It pays dividends to be at war, even if only the participants of that war reap the benefits and everyone else is a casualty of some sort.  Peacemakers would find a way to compromise, not because compromise has any inherent value in and of itself, but because there are times when fighting a war endlessly does more damage than good.  In fact, I’d say almost all wars fit that description.

The Christian right should back off the gay marriage fight and focus more on pro-life issues – and not merely abortion, but also the death penalty and war.  The left isn’t nearly as organized in these matters, and will likely suffer defeat simply by having one fewer cause to take up arms against. [Read more →]

“E.D., please note, is a supporter of same-sex marriage, and believes the Catholic Church is very wrong to oppose it. But he’s starting to see that gay marriage really is a threat to religious liberty. Read him here, here, and finally here.” ~ Rod Dreher

I have all the respect in the world for Rod Dreher, but I think he’s reading too much into my position here.  I don’t see gay marriage as a threat to religious liberty in and of itself.  I think any serious political issue like this – where the issue of granting rights is at stake (I don’t like the phrase “granting rights” but I’m at a loss for something better) – anyways, this sort of conflict can be tricky if it also involves potentially infringing upon another group’s rights in the process.  Handled poorly – as it has been in D.C. – the push for gay rights can pose a threat to religious liberty.

Handled properly, however, I think our system is the perfect one to preserve both.  I don’t see churches being forced to marry gays in the future. I think that would be deemed unconstitutional rather quickly.  Mark Thompson does a really bang-up job with the details of this here.

First, the conflict here is definitively not between gay marriage and religious liberty.  It is instead between laws regarding private discrimination and freedom of association, or perhaps between licensing laws and freedom of religion….

What is important here is that to the extent there is a conflict between gay rights and the free exercise of religion, it is solely within the context of whether anti-discrimination laws writ large present an unacceptable conflict with the free exercise of religion.  Same sex marriage, in and of itself, thus presents no greater a problem for religious liberty than does no-fault divorce.  It is only laws that prohibit private discrimination in the first place that actually present a conflict with the free exercise of religion.  It has also quite often been the courts who have had to step in and create exceptions to those laws to alleviate the conflict with religious liberty and freedom of association due to the legislature’s failure to adequately do so.

I’m glad Mark took the time to lay all this out, and you should read the whole thing because it goes into a ton of details that I didn’t excerpt.

My point in arguing over the religious liberty question last week was three-fold:

• first, to point out that there was a ton of spin going on in the press, essentially blaming the church when in fact it was the city threatening to pull contracts;
• second, to point out that religious liberty is also an important issue and one worthy of our support because no matter how you spin it, we are all of us effected by it whether we’re religious or not;
• and third, that gay rights advocates should be careful not to support measures that really do threaten religious liberty – it’s bad strategy, and risks small victories at the expense of later defeats.

I still support gay marriage and all that it entails.  I still support religious liberty.  I find no incongruence in this position.

Rod Dreher makes the case, once again, that same-sex marriage presents a unique and unavoidable conflict that will drastically undermine religious liberty in this nation, concluding that the ”conflict between gay rights and religious liberty is deep, serious and irresolvable to the satisfaction of both.”  Dreher further argues that:

“It’s one thing if the boundaries of gay rights are set by statute, as in the DC case. It’s another if they are set by a court in a constitutional case. In the former, exemptions for religious organizations can be carved out — but if the Supreme Court decides that gay marriage is a constitutional right, then religious organizations will be given much less room to move, and there’s nothing they will be able to do about it.”

On both counts, Rod misunderstands the nature of the conflict and the role of the legislature and courts in creating (or potentially alleviating) that conflict.

First, the conflict here is definitively not between gay marriage and religious liberty.  It is instead between laws regarding private discrimination and freedom of association, or perhaps between licensing laws and freedom of religion.  As they affect the private sphere and specifically religious organizations, gay rights, and specifically same-sex marriage, represent at most an expansion of existing conflicts rather than any new type of conflict.  Even here, the conflict arises not from whether or not same-sex marriage is permitted, but instead from whether or not statutory laws recognize sexual orientation as an impermissible basis for private discrimination (whether in an employment context, public accommodations context, or otherwise), which is independent of whether same-sex marriage is permitted.

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